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Just last week, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten paid $900 million for Viber. Other messaging services such as WeChat, Line or Kakao are concentrated in Asia.

Livingston acknowledges that Kik, which was started in 2009 by a handful of University of Waterloo students, has 100 million users now, and would generate interest from the big tech companies.

However, he says Kik remains focused on its product — and competing with WhatsApp even though that 50-employee shop will now be part of Facebook.

“Texting apps are the most popular apps,” Livingston said. “It gives you an opportunity to push out the games you want to push out, the shopping experiences you want to push out, because you have such a captive, big, fast-growing audience.”

Rotman School of Management professor Joshua Gans says that while there may be room for several messaging services, users like to gravitate to the same platforms their friends are using.

“There is a case to be made that there is a winner-take-all element here,” Gans said, noting Facebook may acquire other smaller companies. “WhatsApp is probably a good bet. Imagine how many more users they got today.”

Gans added that BlackBerry’s BBM messaging service was a leading-edge communications service, but company officials chose not to offer the service on other devices such as Apple or Android until last fall.

In December, BlackBerry said more than 40 million users of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS registered for free BBM software in the previous 60 days.

“BlackBerry always had the problem that you had to have BlackBerry” to use BBM), Gans said. “BlackBerry could have done this. If BlackBerry had done this five years ago when smartphones came out, they would now be an app company.

“But they failed. They kept it closed. They kept it as something exclusive to BlackBerry because they were trying to sell BlackBerrys,” he said. “As it turns out, they were in the right business but they weren’t focused on it.

“We now know how much that lost opportunity was — bigger than the value of the company now, many times over.”

Still Carmi Levy sees a silver lining.

“For BlackBerry, this is the best news,” said Levy, an independent tech analyst. “It values them more highly than had previously been the case.”

Shares in BlackBerry stock closed at $10.41, up 45 cents, in Toronto. Facebook shares closed in New York at $69.63, up $1.57.

It was no surprise that Facebook was interested in a mobile instant messaging business, given it bought the photo-sharing mobile app Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and it had a recent failed attempt to buy Snapchat, another photo-sharing app.

“What surprised investors was the price tag,” said Paul Sweeney, a media and internet analyst at Bloomberg Industries. “Nineteen billion dollars is a lot of money for a company that has little to no revenue.”

WhatsApp, which is popular in Europe and Asia, allows people to send instant text messages to smartphone devices, so users can avoid paying telecom fees for texts under their mobile phone plans.

WhatsApp is free for the first year, and then costs 99 cents annually after that.

Sweeney argues Facebook is focused on WhatsApp’s current subscriber base of 450 million monthly users, plus 1 million more every day, and its potential growth, especially in emerging markets, where mobile dominates over the desktop computer.

Increasingly, consumers are spending more time on mobile instant messaging, from sending videos to group chats, especially outside North America.

“Facebook viewed that as a source of competition, in terms that it is competing against users’ time,” Sweeney said, noting even though Facebook has its own messaging service, it isn’t nearly as popular as WhatsApp.

Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, said this purchase means a new stake had been placed on the ground on valuation.

“Google probably buys someone, and maybe Microsoft buys someone,” he said. “It is a double-edged sword. The competition is enhanced, but the competition was always looming.”

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